Archive for the ‘Quilts’ Category

It’s by Robyn Pandolph, from a collection called Aubrey Rose. It’s from approximately 2004, when she was designing for South Seas Imports. It’s a tone-on-tone green and I need about 1/4 to 1/2 yard.

I have Googled, and tried Quiltshops.com, but all I can even find pictures of online are the focal florals, none of this tone-on-tone. I’ll give Missingfabrics.com a whirl next, but I thought I’d give this a try — maybe you have a bit of this hiding in your stash that you’d be willing to trade with me? (I’ll pay postage and trade you for comparable yardage of something from the shop or my stash…).

And of course, you probably want to know WHY I need this. Well, instead of cleaning (or writing patterns, or writing/drawing my book), I fell prey to temptation again.

Only look!

Another finished quilt top!

Pattern is Peppermint Swirls by Fig Tree Quilts. Pattern calls for some words (jingle all the way) appliqued on it, but I don’t like what she did, don’t think it “goes”. Pattern picture shows it bound in red and I really don’t like that, but I only have about half of what I need in order to bind it in the green (it was a kit).

The blocks were together, I needed to add one more corner triangle, trim it, and add the white and green borders.

Having finished 2 quilt tops, I now I feel justified in starting something new!

Ha!

TTFN-

Suzanne aka EDG

p.s. i was going to write it as EDGirl. But then I worried that it looked like I was calling myself Erectile Dysfunction Girl.

You are not going to be surprised to learn that I did not clean, I gave into temptation and sewed.

Only, look! I resisted the temptation to start something new and I actually finished something.

And by finished, I mean that I finished the quilt top.

I really like the look of a braid, but this quilt was not fun to make — I’m actually surprised that I persevered. Those braided strips were so poky. Ugh.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I enjoy sitting and being one with my sewing machine as I sew and sew and sew and sew. But this was tediously poky. I’d sew and sew and sew and…not be able to tell that I’d actually DONE anything. I like to at least see a little bit of progress.

I managed to make myself keep going until it was going to be approximately square and then I quit. The tiny triangles (finished at 1 inch square…) and are waste triangles from another project. There’s something like 200 of them on this quilt. I have hundreds left.

Last night, I needed to finish piecing one half square border, attach it, plus attach the one that was already sewn to the other side — after that it was reliatively quick work to add the blue border and get the binding ready to go. Not sure how I’ll quilt it. I’m not sure if I’m keeping this one, or if it will be a QOV.

The beauty of the new location for the sewing room is that I don’t have to quit sewing when Mark wants to go to bed. Yea! Sewing into the wee hours, here I come!

These were actually done last night, but it was too dark to take pictures. And the pictures I took this morning aren’t all that great, but I wanted to have them “modeled” by my helpers.

Get it? Fraternal Twin Quilts? The same, but not the same?

I guess it helps to know that the boys are Fraternal Twins. (Speaking of which, I never did write any more posts about having twins, did I? I’ll have to remedy that).

Excuse all that stuff you can see laying around in the background. And the Be Merry sign in the window.

Honey, I found another Christmas deco that didn’t get put away.

We had our Christmas countdown calendar (frozen on 7 days til Christmas) on the wall until a few days ago.

The pictures I took this morning weren’t great. The boys had no interest in helping me.

But I wanted to show you what the original picture that I showed above looks like:

I still have a lot to do to figure out how to get the picture coming straight out of the camera (SOOC) to look good, but I feel like I’ve been let into a secret society now that I’ve figured out to make the pictures I do take look better.

Here’s the edited picture again:

And then the two side by side:

(to see it larger, click on the picture, then click on ALL SIZES (up above the picture) which will give you different size options to look at)

I did several things to this picture, including sharpening it, running a noise reduction filter, and running an action called Boost, from The Pioneer Woman.

My aim is not professional photography, or doing lots of fancy touch-ups…and I’m not saying the fnial result is great, but it sure is a lot brighter and sharper. Of course, I’m also something of a geek (OK, a LOT geek), and this sort of thing thrills me in the core of my geekiness.

Time for my inner geek to go shower and get breakfast and get moving. Have a great day!

Between multiple days off school (unplanned) and various other things going on, I sometimes lose track of what day it is. I do know that today was Martin Luther King Jr. Day, so I guess that means it was, in fact, Monday.

I had seen the idea in a number of places: spend the day in service, and as a quilter, I knew where my time would be spent. I wanted to work on something for the Quilt of Valor efforts of Alycia. I took a pass through my various in-process projects and realized that none would suit the purpose.

Naturally, that meant I needed to start something new.

I started with the brightly colored fabric you can see in the back, and pulled brights to go with it. I had decided to make a Strip Twist quilt, and had this great idea that if I was cutting for one lap size quilt, I might as well cut for two. Which meant going back to the drawing board for the background fabric, but the result is going to make for better quilts. I cut and actually sewed for quite awhile last night.

And then did as much sewing as I could today. I was hoping to get further, but the shop was busier than I was expecting it to be.

I discovered this evening that I can’t count. I was sure I had enough parts for all 24 blocks, but when I got it everything sewn together, I only had 23 blocks. I did some more cutting, sewed it all together and now have 24, enough for 2 quilts. I hope to get them set together and bordered and quilted yet this week.

Alycia needs all the quilts she can get to make her goal this spring. I hope that if you are a quilter, you’ll consider helping out, either with her goal of 400 (or more!) this spring, or through the Quilt of Valor foundation directly.

I mentioned earlier in the month that we had started doing a nightly reading about USAmerican History with the boys. I’m happy to say that we started week 3 tonight, and it’s going really well. We only missed one night, and one night I actually took the book with us when we went shopping, and we read it at McDonald’s. LOL

Quite a few of the readings have been about slavery or the horrible things early settlers inflicted on the Native Americans. And I’m not sure I ever really realized how much of our nation’s beginnings are owed to tobacco.

Now that we’ve gotten that habit started, I got to thinking I wanted to pick up something else that I have been meaning to try to do, and that’s learn more about how to read and think critically about books. I read a lot, but purely for pleasure and sometimes i read so fast, that I’m mostly just skimming.

Mark had the Beatles going tonight at supper. I was quietly singing along (how can you NOT sing this one???)…

all you need is love…

all you need is love…

And then Joe asked me to stop…(his timing was impeccable)…

ALL YOU NEED IS LO-OVE! LOVE IS ALL YOU NEED!

I adore driving them crazy.

Speaking of them:

Part of my goal with these photos is to learn more about Photoshop, so I dinked around for awhile with Actions and such-like and decided I liked the look of this action from the Pioneer Woman. That wall in the background is actually very yellow. I think it’s cool.

I think I’ve mentioned before that Mark has been helping to coach our elementary school’s Lego League Team. The team gets to go to the state competition on Saturday, which is quite exciting. Santa brought Will, Joe and Mark a Lego Mindstorm set of their very own, and tonight they decided to try to build the Scorpion Robot. I don’t know how far they got, but they were having fun. That’s Katie sitting on Mark’s lap, keeping an eye on everything. Or maybe she was sleeping…

Remember how I realized in a previous post that the pictures I had thought I had taken yesterday were probably non-existant? Well, I was right. Duh. The above picture is a fake. It’s not even precisely the same as what I had taken yesterday. The picture I really wanted to use was a spread out stack of about 30 of my books, waiting to be shipped. I couldn’t retake their picture because…they got shipped. So, a stack of covers will have to suffice. It’s hard for me to imagine how many copies of those covers and books I’ve printed and punched and bound and shipped over the last 2.5 years. A lot.

And with this one, I’m now caught up on this week’s pictures. I was going to use the frosted window picture, but decided that I’m ignoring the weather right now, and would rather remember this quilt. I somewhat surreptitiously posted a link to these pictures the other day, so in case you missed them, more pics of this can be found at this post. I am extremely happy with how this quilt has turned out. I really like it when things turn out the way you expect them to.

As of this moment, school has posted a 2 hour delay. It is just so *bad word* cold out there, and is supposed to stay that way. It’d be nice if they could actually go to school, but we’ll see what happens.

The front step and sidewalk LOOK like they are wet, but it is actually a sheet of ice out there.

And the picture looks sort of cloudy because I was taking it through the storm door, which started to fog up while I was trying to get Katie’s attention.

I was going to go downtown and try to finish taking inventory, but opted to stay home. Mark offered to drive me, but…I was OK with staying home. (It meant more quality time with my sewing machine, resulting in TWO quilts that are now bound and washed) and some 4-patch posie blocks I was playing with awhile ago are now assembled into rows. I can’t sew the rows together yet, because I need to get some more fabric from downtown for setting triangles…

Two years ago I tried this Daily Photo thing, and lasted until the end of February (Actually, that surprises me, I didn’t think I had made it that long…). I’m hoping to keep it going the entire year. I am planning to print them and somehow put them into a binder or album and include the journaling/explanation so that 50 years my boys will know why I took a picture of the dog staring up at my through the window.

Oh! After I took that photo of Mark last night, EVERY time I wandered past him for the entire rest of the evening, he was most definitely asleep (no matter what HE says.)

Another in-motion picture — that’s OK, she was busy today! It’s inventory time, and since the boys went skiing, I was lucky enough to have Lucy has a helper for a couple of hours this morning. She worked on counting yarn, I was messing around with the fabric. I’m trying to figure out why I have MORE of a couple of things than the inventory sheet says I should have. I expected to have LESS, but MORE? Wonder what I screwed up…

I’ve still got a lot of counting yet to do, but I have to admit to not working very hard at it, I’m “technically” on vacation…

This morning I finished up the quilt top, it’s a project that my sister asked me to make. She’ll be giving it away to a friend’s mother. If she can bear to give it away.

If *I* can bear to let her have it to be given away. I have PLENTY(!!) of quilts in my home, but I keep falling in love with the new ones I make.

I’ll show you the picture of the quilt here, but if you want to know more about the quilt, you’ll have to go visit my other blog.

I hope you are having a lovely day, I’m going to go park myself in a chair for a bit with a book, and then I’m going to take myself to the movies (Australia), and then I’m going to sit around waiting for my intrepid skiers to return home. No phone calls, which I take as a positive thing.